This week I attended a two-day conference on health, gender, bodies, and sex at ANU. I was there because I have been working on a health humanities project as a research officer at ANU, under one of my PhD supervisors, Bonnie McConnell. The idea of health humanities is to examine this intersection between medical research and the impact of this on humans (humanities). But it’s also iterative – what we learn from humanities can be applied to medical practice, resulting in healthcare which is more appropriate for certain communities. For example, one of Bonnie’s research projects looked at the musical responses to ebola in the Gambia after that epidemic. This conference was in general quite out of my usual area, with numerous presentations on, for example, gender, or medical practice.

One part of the conference really stood out to me as being quite important. One of the medical researchers and lecturers, Christine Philips, said that her students who came from non-science pathways usually made better doctors. If you don’t know, to get into medicine, you need to pass a particular exam which has a whole bunch of questions about chemistry and biology as well as some more people-focused questions. What is interesting is that, it seems, the science can be taught quite easily (it is mainly memorisation), but the act of actually putting it into practice is something which people which come from arts or humanities backgrounds did better with.

One example – Philips said that when ANU still had a drama program, they would get their doctors in training to attend a course which teaches performers how to walk and how to own the stage, or the space they are in. And she said that this was one of the most useful courses they had, because most doctors in training come from backgrounds where they were not very confident and so really struggled to own their space when working in medical settings. This is a very salient point – studying things outside of your direct field of learning is one way to improve your chances of serendipity. The reason we have fonts on computers is because Steve Jobs took a course on typography in college. I distinctly remember a music composition lecture where we watched some Jerry Seinfeld stand-up: the lecturer was demonstrating how Seinfeld’s comedy writing is very similar to approaching a composition – multiple ideas, smartly connected, while challenging the audience’s expectations. Learning something new may not revolutionse your area – but it could give you the idea that leads to your next breakthrough.

What interesting things have you came across by chance studying something new? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. I am now in Indonesia, so still expect blog posts but they might be at different times or more haphazard for the next couple of months. Check out my instagram for weekly updates on Friday with some audio-visual records of what I’m seeing.